FYI Dan
I switched awhile back from Eclipse (I was a long-time user) to
IntelliJ and I love it. It takes a bit getting used to the key
mappings but the refactoring capabilities are just awesome. I'm also
amazed at the things it can catch from analyzing code. And even
better, JetBrains offers free open source licenses so you can pick
one up if you like it.
Jim
On Jun 10, 2006, at 2:44 PM, Daniel Kulp wrote:
Jeremy,
Dan, what's the Eclipse issue with ruleset? Is it a Eclipse extension
thing or something that would impact the main build?
The eclipse PMD plugin has some strange "design flaws" (IMO) that
make it
harder to use than it really should be. The main restriction is
that there
isn't really a way to set a "global" ruleset that can be referenced
by the
project. For example, with the Checkstyle plugin, in our
workspace we can
create a named set of checkstyle rules called "Tuscany Checks" that
points to
the tuscany-checkstyle.xml file. The ".checkstyle" file in each
project is
then very small, it just says "use Tuscany Checks". That way, if the
tuscany-checkstyle.xml changes, then all projects get the changes.
PMD, on the otherhand, cannot do that. It only sets rules in one
of two
ways:
1) In the project, there is a ".ruleset" file that defines all the
rules for
that project. This means the .ruleset file needs to be copied to ALL
directories and if you want to change the PMD rules, you need to re-
copy to
all directories. (although that does allow different directories
to have
different rules)
2) You configure a bunch of rules in the workspace, but each
project then
specifies which of those rules to use in their .pmd file. Thus,
if you want
to add a new rule, you need to modify the .pmd file in each
directory. That
sucks just as bad.
The PMD maven plugin doesn't suffer the problem. It can use a
single file
defined elsewhere (in the buildtools jar) for all the projects. The
workaround I mentioned was to create a "setup.eclipse" profile that
unpacks
the file from that jar and creates the .ruleset file from it.
Thus, each
directory doesn't have the .ruleset file checked into svn. It's
created
only if you need it for eclipse. The cool thing is the
"setup.eclipse"
profile can also generate the .checkstyle and .pmd files at the
same time so
those don't get checked in. (just FYI: we are NOT doing this in
celtix yet.
I just figured out how to do that workaround last week)
PMD has some other problems as well:
1) The MAVEN PMD plugin cannot check the test sources. It can
ONLY be
configured to test src/main/java. I've already logged a bug on
that.
2) The ECLIPSE PMD plugin cannot be configured to NOT check the
generated
sources. This is a real killer for projects that have generated
artifacts.
In general, generated artifacts rarely meet all the .pmd
requirements unless
the .pmd requirements aren't very strict. For Celtix, we use very
few PMD
rules so the JAXB generated code passes.
3) PMD is pretty slow. Checkstyle is about the same speed as
Javac. If you
configure a bunch of PMD rules, it can take a LONG time. However,
because
of (2), we don't configure many rules so it's not too bad.
Anyway, those are all PMD issues, not Checkstyle. The checkstyle
stuff works
quite well. You can tell Checkstyle to check only ^src/**/*.java
so the
stuff in target/generated is ignored. You can use a "named"
config file so
each project doesn't need one. It's also relatively quick
(compared to
PMD).
Or a somewhat related note, does anyone have any experience with the
Jetstyle IDEA plugin (or another way of integrating this with IDEA)?
Haven't tried it yet. I just started trying out IDEA on
Wednesday. I'm
investigating if it can help with some big "Celtix refactorings"
that we're
working on, but it hung when I tried to do a major refactor (change
the
package names for EVERYTHING). (That said, eclipse didn't fare
much better)
--
J. Daniel Kulp
Principal Engineer
IONA
P: 781-902-8727 C: 508-380-7194 F:781-902-8001
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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